Lenore Skenazy, writing in the WSJ, says today is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia: If a new fear flies on Halloween, it’s probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too. Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the...

Jon Stewart’s media critique claims “the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false,” that “we know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together.” He says we already are, “the truth is…we work together to get things done every damned day!” Stewart is right. We are a nation that is closely divided, not deeply divided. We just...

Earlier today CBS teased a “sure-to-be-controversial” crowd estimate for the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. Twenty minutes ago they posted it: An estimated 215,000 people attended a rally organized by Comedy Central talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News. The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance at the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on aerial pictures it took over...

In light of yesterday’s news that explosives-laden toner cartridges bound for a Chicago synagogue had “all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda,” here’s one more on the exaggerated cyber war threat from Hersh’s New Yorker piece: There is surprising unanimity among cyber-security experts on one issue: that the immediate cyber threat does not come from traditional terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, at least, not for the moment. “Terrorist groups are not particularly good now in attacking...

A small black noose was left hanging from the door of the Santa Ana office of Equality California Thursday night. Mel Distel, a 25-year-old volunteer, called the cops: When the police arrived, two officers spoke to Daniel and myself outside. The male officer dominated the conversation. There was nothing they could do, of course, there was no suspect and no crime had been committed. The officer said “what it is, is a string on a door.” My vision got blurry, I was embarrassed and felt stupid...

For all the talk of a cyber-war threat, it turns out, Attacks on Pentagon Networks Dropped this year: In the first six months of 2010, there were about 30,000 such incidents, according to statistics compiled by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Last year, there were more than 71,000. “If the rate of malicious activity from the first half of this year continues through the end of the year,” the commission notes in a draft report on China and the internet, “2010...

Is all that worry about cyber-attacks stirred up by strategically placed stories? Susan Crawford sees a trail of data points worth following. I’ll quote here only her first, second and last: 1. Cyberattack – there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity reports for the National Research Council. Ethan Zuckerman has summarized a...

If the Republican sweep materializes Tuesday we’ll have lots more of them: The Sore Winners are easy to find. They are most visible at their flagship, Fox News, which dominates both cable news and the political conversaton and yet is always embattled, defending itself against the heathen. They are loudest not only on secular talk radio, but also in Christian broadcasting, which tells its listeners that a nation that remains a nation of Christians rather than a Christian nation is a nation that...

UPDATE: Video of the Anderson Cooper 360° interview with Arkansas school board member and vice-president of Midland School District, Clint McCance. In it McCance says, “I am going to resign from the school board. It is to help my community, to help school. I don’t want them to receive bad press or have a distraction because of some ignorant comments that I make.” ++++++++++++++ Further to co-bloggers Patrick and Kathy, Arkansas school board member Clint McCance told CNN’s...

Commenting on Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March, Anne Applebaum suggests so: It’s bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a "Rally to Restore Sanity" is to make it into a television comedian’s joke. But it’s far worse that the "moderates" in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This is how words, and then ideas, vanish from our political lexicon: Whatever...

A throw away line worth a second look from WaPo culture critic Hank Stuever’s look at The Daily Show in DC this week: For added insult, there have been remote-reporter gags from “Daily Show” staff comics that paint the town as a corrupt quagmire. Samantha Bee made fun of the “subway, excuse me, the Metro,” which she said was a word for “subway’s gay cousin.” (G-word jokes? After all these weeks of “It Gets Better” viral videos against bullying...

“Yes we can, but…” I thought he was great, but… At one point, Stewart asked the president if he was now operating on the principle of “Yes, we can, with certain conditions.” Obama replied, “I think I would say, ‘Yes we can, but–’” That drew laughter from the 550-strong audience that packed DC’s Harman Center for the Arts. It was the first time that a sitting president appeared on the Daily Show, though Obama appeared on the show during...

Seymour Hersh wonders, should we be worried about a cyber war? The short answer, NO! The amount of cyber-jargon we’ve got in government is stupefying: A Cyber Czar rules Cyber Command assessing the cyber threat to our cyber security; we need cyber weapons to defend against a cyber attack, protect against cyber-pillaging and wage cyber war; we must develop cyber capabilities able to withstand sustained cyber operations… to say nothing of the cyber-crime threat from cyber-criminals. And...

Google Now Accounts for 6.4% of Internet Traffic: Netflix Accounts For 20% Of Peak U.S. Internet Bandwidth (subscriptions jump in third quarter): Internet traffic has grown 62 percent in 2010 (it was up 74 percent in 2009):

Philip Gourevitch, writing in “Alms Dealers” for The New Yorker [subscription required], is persuaded. And persuasive: Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country’s appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress? That is the central contention of Polman’s new book, “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” [link] (Metropolitan; $24), translated...

The war between the states was a war between peoples of all colors, on both sides of the fight. White men, and enslaved and free African Americans all those sides [sic]… Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson. – Our Virginia: Past and Present, Joy Masoff Joy Masoff is not trained a historian. The author of “Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty” and “Oh Yikes! History’s...

While the Right kicks NPR and the rest of us tend to think of it as defined by Morning Edition and All Things Considered and Fresh Air, Bill McKibben (writing before Juan) takes a look at the rest of NPR in The New York Review of Books: The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others—like Davia Nelson...

John Batelle has a fascinating post exploring how our identities are presented on the web. He begins by noting the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape: The Dependent Web is dominated by companies [Facebook, Google, and increasingly Twitter] that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past,...

This year we’ve seen the end of the browser and the death of the web, and the end of the mouse, possibly even the death of the desktop tower. With the introduction of the new MacBook Air we’re seeing the death of the disk. No, not yet the hard drive (though the Air doesn’t have one; it uses flash memory instead). The optical drive. MG Siegler: When you get your MacBook Air and you open the box, you will find exactly zero optical discs inside. Normally, Apple includes at least one...

But that’s down 8 points in 2 months: Since the August poll, Senate Republicans blocked efforts to set the stage for a legislative repeal of the policy and a district judge ordered that the policy no longer be enforced, a ruling being appealed by the government… The decision that the policy can no longer be enforced has prompted discharged gay troops to reenlist, though their status could change as courts rule on the issue. The Pentagon has instructed gay troops who are currently serving...

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is back. At least until Monday: Less than 24 hours after a federal judge refused to block an injunction against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the U.S. court of appeals for the ninth circuit has done so — at least temporarily. A three-judge panel ordered a stay requested by the Justice Department “temporarily in order to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented” in the federal lawsuit against DADT,...

LATER: Exactly as expected. Maybe the most noteworthy element… Facetime for the Mac. How so? Apple has flipped the playbook putting mobile tech in PCs…… Let’s start with the facts. Apple announced last week a special “Back to the Mac” media event for today at 1 PM ET at their Cupertino headquarters. In it they promised “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.” The invite image (above) has a lion peaking out from behind the Apple logo. With...

UPDATE: Federal District Judge Virginia Phillips has rejected the government’s request for a stay on the injunction she issued barring enforcement of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a six-page-order. SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston: The judge ruled one day after holding a hearing on the government request for delay. She had telegraphed at that hearing her leaning against any postponement. The judge was tartlly critical of the government for...

Not really so surprising, I suppose, but Dahlia Lithwick points out those corporate privacy rights are expanding even as our individual privacy rights are shrinking: The Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a case in which AT&T prevailed in its efforts to evade a Freedom of Information Act request because Exemption 7(C) of FOIA, protecting “personal privacy,” also now protects the privacy of corporate entities. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held that FOIA “unambiguously indicates...

The company is making tech news today for a $20 million round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Evernote has earned 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010). They still have over $9 million raised last year, and promise: We’ll build more features, fix more bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more types of users (including corporate and educational folk). I was an Evernote subscriber...